A Pain Impossible Even To Imagine

RUSSELL BAKER

It was grisly in Manhattan. People were riding around in those ridiculous-looking three-bedroom limousines sobbing.

Wall Street was firing people. Despair was thicker than Mom's chipped-beef gravy left over from Sunday breakfast.

When the financial markets tumbled not long ago, nobody cared anymore about Monica, Bill, Linda, Paula, Hyde, Gingrich. In Manhattan, the great nonstop Washington scandal was deader than Latin in an American high school.

For the first time in their lives, youthful Wall Street geniuses had discovered that the stock market could also go down.

It was like learning that leaves fall in the autumn, that snow melts in the spring, that the Boston Red Sox die in early October.

Men whose exploits had stunned Salomon Brothers, amazed Alan Greenspan and staggered markets from Hong Kong to South Baltimore looked on in disbelief as the market went down.

Yet it was going down, and fast. Maybe not as fast as a stack of pancakes and a dozen eggs in a man who hasn't eaten for two weeks, but fast enough.

All over the city in crowded public places money men stood naked but for their $3,000 suits, $500 shirts, $300 neckties, $900 shoes and, naturally, their cell phones.

The cell phones looked as if they had become permanently attached to their faces, like fried seafood dinners eaten just before midnight that get permanently attached to your esophagus, stomach and deeper innards.

With those cell phones it was like going to a street-carnival shooting gallery with your own personal machine gun. Cell-phone guys stood on sidewalks all over town racking up dollars by the million.

Just last week in Manhattan, however, what they were saying into those cell phones was different. It was no longer like James Cagney shouting ``Top of the world, Ma!''

It was sadder than a heated pastrami sandwich on the Metroliner.

Walking through Penn Station, I saw dozens of these young gods of money mumbling into their cell phones. You couldn't help overhearing them.

They were calling their parents. It was as poignant as the end of an Andy Hardy movie with Mother Hardy near death and arrogant young Andy, obedient to a higher power (Louis B. Mayer, the historians say) falling to his knees in Christian prayer.

Some of these knights of the cell phone were saying, ``Dad, could you let me have $50 million till the end of the week?''

Others were saying, ``Mom, I didn't really mean it about never wanting to spend another night in that ratty little four-bedroom house. Would you mind if I came home and settled in my old bedroom for a month or two?''

Some Wall Streeters have been pulling down bonuses running up to $25 million and environs. (No kidding.) It's as fat, dumb and happy as Rome just before the fall, or maybe only Pompeii just before the eruption.

Now the hardship these people will face is painful to imagine. Until now, paying $1,000 for a bottle of wine for dinner has been one way of strutting their market know-how.

Suddenly those days are more remote than Myrt and Marge, Just Plain Bill and Easy Aces, not to mention the Hupmobile. Yes, horribile dictu, New York restaurants are expected to drop the price of their $1,000 wines to $800, maybe even $750.

It's hard to see how a prince of finance can cut a figure at those prices. It'll be like saying you're going to drink champagne out of a beautiful woman's slipper, only to find she's wearing worn-out tennis shoes.

Also being fired are the kind of people who come to work by subway instead of three-bedroom limos or helicopters. It's like there ain't no justice.